Comments on: Removing duplicate tracks from iTunes with Ruby and RBOSA

By: clynne

clynne — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:55:03 +0000

I’ve had a few cases where both Stephanie and I imported the same album and they ended up with slightly different names — different punctuation or capitalization, etc — so they don’t show up as “duplicates.”

Totally lame.

By: cp

cp — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:40:58 +0000

Yeah, that always bugged me. Worse is that neither iTunes’ “View Duplicates” nor the one that I wrote does anything smart like checking for track or album name similarities with short edit distances or matching soundex codes or whatever. I’ve had a few cases where both Stephanie and I imported the same album and they ended up with slightly different names — different punctuation or capitalization, etc — so they don’t show up as “duplicates.”

Hmm. None of this would be hard to do. Perhaps I should improve upon this script tonight.

By: clynne

clynne — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:21:35 +0000

Oh, and “View Duplicates” is sort of useless, as it appears to be going off only title and artist. I have two versions of, for example, George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog.” One clocks in at 2:45, the other at 3:xx. Clearly they’re variant recordings, but iTunes considers them both duplicates.

By: cp

cp — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:50:31 +0000

Yeah, “View Duplicates” is definitely there. If there were only a few dozen, that would definitely get the job done.

By: clynne

clynne — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:49:06 +0000

I would have sworn that I had seen a “remove duplicates” function in iTunes. … aha, OK, I think what I was was the View option “View Duplicates.”